Okay, so I'm already happy with my Synology DS210+. It serves the music to my 360 and PS3 much faster than my computer was doing it. There always used to be a bit of a lag factor, but now scrolling through and playing is instantaneous. Now I need to try out all of the other features, which it has a ton of. I had no idea NAS was now such a feature-rich product. Here's hoping the other functions are handled as well as the music streaming.

I'll post more in this thread as I play around with it. And you can all say, "Yeah, duh, we already knew all of this."

Nice. I think I looked at that one before but it was a bit too much for me. I have been using an HP MediaSmart EX495. Works great but then again, not a real RAID solution. But it does have a Tivo plug in to archive all my HD content.

The MediaSmarts look really slick. The only reason I didn't go for one is because I figured I'd wait until ones based on the upcoming version of Windows Home Server start coming out. In the meantime, I'm surprised how much this unit offers. If I do move to a MediaSmart in the future, I'll let this one be solely my parents'.

Yeah, the MediaSmart does play nice w/ my Macs which is nice. Also, it does support eSATA and USB for drive expansion. I've filled up all 4 internal bays so I will have to get an external eSATA enclosure for additional storage.

My friend just bought the Drobo FS and I'm a little jealous. SO easy to configure and expand.

It seems like there are quite a number of ways to accomplish this mirroring of data to the NAS. I've already copied my media and documents manually, but now I'm looking for a way to sync the folders on my computer's drive with the folders on the NAS. Right now I'm letting SyncToy 2.1 do its thing.... All of the options I've come across so far require me to run a sync process. Even if it's a scheduled event, it's not as convenient as I'd hoped for. Am I blind, or is there not a way to have the sync happen automatically with every change? How would you do this? If I can't do that easily, I suppose I'll just set up a weekly backup of all of my media and documents. I'll use the NAS as my normal storage location for those files and let it save a backup image to my computer's current media/documents drive. It would be great to have a direct, instantaneous mirror of the data, though.

I haven't even attempted to see how to do any backing up of my parents' Macs yet. I still have zero personal experience with using Macs. Like me, the things they'll want to back up are media and documents. Anyone have any tips on how they'd go about easily backing those up to the NAS? Thanks for any insight you can offer.

There are some projects for Linux that do file system mirroring over a network connection. But they are mostly experimental.

Everything I do involves a scheduled sync. Cron in Linux, and the Scheduler in Windows.

I haven't looked at SyncToy in years. But if it is only synching the changes, it might not hurt to run it every hour. It depends on how badly it degrades performance while it is running. The other thing to watch out for, is reading in a large amount of filesystem data can also purge all the good disk cache, and slow down programs until they've reloaded themselves. If that happens every hour, then you could end up never building up a good cache set for very long.

Daily backups are usually good enough for home use. But experiment, if you want to try more often, see how it affects performance.

Look for Time Machine on the Macs (it's part of the later OS X releases), see if it will backup to the network drive (I know it does to Apple branded devices).

I know Time Machine is supposed to work with this drive, but I'm unsure exactly how it works. They can set it up to only back up media and documents to it and not full backups, right?

Daily backups will be fine for me. The main thing I don't want to lose is my music collection, and I don't get new stuff every day, and even if I did, only losing a day's worth of acquisitions isn't going to be impossible to recover. SyncToy run nightly with Task Scheduler looks like my best option right now. And yes, it only syncs the changes.